This is a Fiction Story Book. This book has been prepared because, although the student has been abundantly supplied with aids to decorative art, there is little, within his reach, concerning pictorial composition. I have added thereto hints on the critical judgment of pictures with the hope of simplifying to the many the means of knowing pictures, prompted by the recollection of the topsyturviness of this question as it confronted my own mind a score of years ago. I was then apt to strain at a Oorot hoping to discover in the employment of some unusual color or method the secret of its worth, and to think of the old masters as a different order of beings from the rest of mankind.
